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| A Belated Lustration Law |
| (2012-02-29) |
| Last updated: 2012-03-01 13:01 EET |
The law imposes restrictions on certain rights for a period of five years for those people who held various positions during the Communist regime. The law applies to those who held paid jobs within the main structures of the Romanian Communist Party between March 1945 and December 1989, those people who belonged to the structures of the former political police – the Securitate - and who collaborated with that institution.
The document was re-examined by members of expert committees with a view to harmonizing the text of the law with the decision of the Constitutional Court, which in 2010 declared certain articles from the first version of the law as unconstitutional. In the current version of the law a clear-cut distinction is made between those who run for a public office and those who are appointed.
Those who run for various positions in the state apparatus - such as president, mayor, president of county council, local or county councilor - will not fall under the law’s stipulations. They need to make a sworn statement regarding their past. However, anyone who is appointed to office must be verified after the lustration law comes into force. The institution to deal with these verifications is the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives.
Therefore, a person can run for president but cannot occupy the position of prime minister if his or her past comes under the application of the lustration law. In the plenary debates, the deputies decided to include Communist prosecutors in the category of people affected by the lustration law. The proposal was made by Mate Andras Levente, a member of the Democratic Union of Ethnic Hungarians in Romania, which is part of the ruling coalition in Bucharest. He explained that:
Mate Andras Levente: “At present, a former Communist prosecutor could be elected to Romania’s Parliament, could be appointed minister or state secretary, and could become a member of the local or county councils. This is unacceptable.”
The new version of the lustration law no longer includes the provision affecting those who held top positions within Romania’s diplomatic and consular missions abroad. The president of the December 21st 1989 Association, Teodor Maries, said that the lustration law was passed much too late, but its enforcement will “deal with part of the Romanian politicians’ immorality”.
For the former Romanian president, Ion Iliescu, who is now honorary president of the opposition Social Democratic Party, the new lustration law is “discriminatory, aberrant and totally useless”. He doubts that the lustration law can be regarded as moral reparation because, he says, those guilty of crimes during the former Communist regime have already been punished.
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2025-04-05
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